boiler tube welding?

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I thinking about going back to school to learn how to boiler tube welding.  How hard it is to learn?  Are there plenty of jobs?  Average pay?  I have tig and stick experience just not on any kind of pipe
Reply:I dunno, looks pretty hard to me.
Reply:Waterwall tubes
Reply:from those pictures looks very hard
Reply:Yeah, you gotta be able to weld lefty or righty, sometimes with a mirror, and you have to be able to squirm into some pretty tight spots.
Reply:I guess I will do what I gotta do.  I gotta learn it!
Reply:man timmy, I must say I envy you! it would be a welcomed change to weld on new construction with no fly ash! that looks like a lot of fun. As timmy stated, you have to be content with climbing into some very tight spaces, configuring your body into retarted shapes, welding with mirrors, all the while performing xray quality welds. In my particular situation our unit runs a lot.... so you can be getting called out in the middle of the night to walk down the boiler to find a leak, and then while force cooling the unit you have to crawl in and do your repairs with flyash falling like snow, did I mention heat? Boilers and affiliated equipment generally also require you to have experience with exotic alloys such as high chrome steels, personally all we deal with in our boiler is 1-1/4 and 2 1/4% chrome, we do have P91 on some of our crossover pipes on the turbines. Its my opinion but it takes a special breed to do this work, BUT also highly rewarding as its such skilled work, high energy piping, and to put it bluntly..... your weld fails your boiling people from the inside out. super heated steam is a scary thing..... I know it scares me! Ive "not witnessed" but came in to diagnose a piping failure at night on one of our auxillery steam lines, 8" with a 1-1/2" wall thickness, P22 - peeled like a freaking banana, just had so much creep in it she had enough! blew a hole right through one of our structural colums web's which was 5/8" thick. Attached ImagesLast edited by Pressure_Welder; 10-06-2013 at 11:37 PM.
Reply:I wasn't welding tubes on that job, I was welding the big pipes in the second pic they call the downcomers. 24" pipe, 2 inches thick-TIG root and hot and 7018 out. It was a whole lot of rod burning to get one of those done. That scaffold was 300 feet off the ground.
Reply:the steam drums look alot thinner than the older units, must be p91? our steam drum is about 6" thick, 48" diameter. No downcomer jobs here yet that ive been a part of. that must be a super critical unit your working on? Just getting ready to  install a new superheater supply valve this morning, just waitin for her to come to temp while i drink my coffee!
Reply:Originally Posted by 2005tritontr186I thinking about going back to school to learn how to boiler tube welding.  How hard it is to learn?  Are there plenty of jobs?  Average pay?  I have tig and stick experience just not on any kind of pipe
Reply:that's not the steam drum, just a header. Here's the steam drum, BTW this was about 5 years back:
Reply:I see a bunch of easy money in those photos.